From the time that my name was recorded on the attendance roll of the church nursery until age 21 when my ministerial calling moved me on to other pastures, I was a faithful, every-time-the-door- was-open member of the First Baptist Church of St. Albans, West Virginia. Having been raised, converted, baptized, instructed, and put up with in that congregation, practically all of my childhood and youth-hood ecclesiastical memories revolve around the life of that edifice on the corner of Second Street and Sixth Avenue and the people who worshipped there. When I revisit the archives of my mind and sights and sounds materialize in the nostalgia of my First Baptist years, I fondly recollect the standard procedures of the downsittings and uprisings in a typical Sunday morning worship service. Beginning at 11:00 a.m. you could set your Timex by the precise sequence of a one-hour service: Organ Prelude, Call to Worship, Hymn –more often than not “Holy, Holy, Holy” or “O Worship the King”, Pastoral Prayer, Hymn—more often than not “All Hail the Pow’r of Jesus’ Name” or “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”, Pastoral Prayer, Announcements, Offering, Choir Anthem, Sermon, Hymn of Invitation—more often than not “Just As I Am” or ”Jesus Calls Us O’er the Tumult”, and at 12:02 p.m. the Benediction, followed by the Organ Postlude. There was a certain sense of security projected through that kind of predictable, substantial regularity; a sort of implied assurance that whatever else may fall victim to the whims and paradigm fluctuations of a shifting society, the security-evoking solidity of Sunday morning worship was not even close to being endangered.
One item on the worship menu that stands out in my mind most clearly—I can hear it now— is the choral response to the pastoral prayer. Week by week the choir varied little from the familiar eighteen musical bars set to the words contained in Habakkuk 2:20 to the effect that “The Lord is in His Holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before Him.”
Throughout the first twenty-one years of my worship life, I experienced a window of time spanning the exposure to five different pastors and their assistants. I witnessed the return of flag decked caskets from World War II and Korea for local burial. There were baby showers, marriages, and funerals (that some quip as “hatches, matches, and dispatches”), and various internal crises where some left in protest to take their offended attitudes to other churches. At least three thousand or more invitation hymns were sung during which many responded by coming forward and many more remained backward. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were given in tithes and offerings. Some prayers were clearly answered and in the case of others, Heaven seemed to be silent. Certain goals and objectives were reached in contrast to other aspirations that were dashed to pieces in unfulfilled hopes.
Yet, with all of that, the most profound affirmation during all those formative years was repeated Sunday after Sunday as a kind of exclamation point to the pastor’s pulpit prayer on a thousand Lord’s Day mornings; the response of the choir in familiar lyrics, blended in harmony and reverent tones.
The Lord is in His holy temple.
The Lord is in His holy temple.
Let all the earth keep silence.
Let all the earth keep silence
Before Him.
Keep silence.
Keep silence
Before Him.
As I recall that oft repeated choral response, and as it reverberates in the corridor of my memory, it serves a prominent role among the factors that energize the way I look at seemingly unanswerable questions and attempt to correlate them with my faith. “The Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before Him. Keep silence. Keep silence.” Wherever my mind ventures and whether or not I arrive at conclusions that satisfy my logic, the first place my reasoning goes and the number one issue in the formula of my theologizing or philosophizing is the fact that the Lord is in His holy temple and the earth, from pole to pole, including me, should observe the silence of awe in His presence. Just as Habakkuk needed to be reminded in answer to his desperate questions to God as to why He was not acting justly and sensibly, you and I also must be aware of it constantly. I know that from that position I am able to navigate. I can be confident that while I am unable to understand, although I will keep trying, and while I cannot exercise control, though I will no doubt lapse into the attempt, the Lord is very much in His temple. The Creator and Sustainer of His universe is on location, and every call is a local call. With a firm grip on that awareness I have a GPS that will eventually get me to the right destination in thinking, living, and dying.
And now for the choral response.
~ Dan Light
Every year, on December 31st, 1 million celebrants gather on the streets of Times Square in Manhattan, New York City, as a time ball made of crystal and electric lights is raised to the top of a pole on the One Times Square building and then lowered to mark the coming of the New Year.
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